Are We Really as Weird as Werner Herzog’s White Crocodiles?

You’ll never guess what I did immediately upon returning home from the Toronto International Film Festival. I watched a movie. And not just any movie but one that had been sitting in my living room for nearly six months, waiting for me to either stick it in the DVD tray or send it the hell back to Netflix. The movie was Deliverance, John Boorman’s 1972 thriller about a group of suburban guys from Atlanta who take a back-to-nature canoe trip and end up in a life-or-death struggle with a bunch of hillbillies with extremely bad teeth. Burt Reynolds and Jon Voight spend a fair bit of time discussing whether “the system” and its nature-stomping ways has left men like themselves better or worse off, but as the dangers mount, it’s clear that most of these guys—and, by extension, most of us—wouldn’t last 24 hours without car keys, central air, and a complete line of kitchen appliances. Today, we can add cell-phone chargers, wireless broadband, and global-positioning systems to that list.

I think Werner Herzog had something like this in mind when he conceived the admittedly bizarre epilogue to his gorgeous, if occasionally plodding, Cave of Forgotten Dreams, a 3-D documentary about the Chauvet cave of southern France. In 1994, two scientists discovered a mother lode of perfectly preserved ancient paintings inside the cave, some dating from as far back as 32,000 years ago. The conditions within the caverns are so delicate that a handful of scientists are the only people allowed inside—ever. So, apart from anything else, this film is a significant contribution to the historical record.VF.com’s John Lopez interviewed Herzog after Monday night's screening, so I will leave further analysis of the film to him, but I did want to touch upon the epilogue, since Herzog appeared uncharacteristically shy about it, joking afterward that he expected to be escorted out of the theater in a straight jacket. (His producer, Erik Nelson, still fuming about a technical malfunction that caused the film to freeze shortly before the epilogue, snarked, “No, that’ll be the projectionist.”)

There’s only so much time you can spend panning across cave paintings made tens of thousands of years ago, however exquisite they may be, so to fill out the film’s feature-size duration, Herzog speaks to scientists in the area about everything from the spirituality of paleolithic societies to the musical instruments and weaponry they employed. After one moustachioed Frenchman gamely attempts to chuck a spear to show how the old-timers did it, Herzog forces him to acknowledge that the paleolithic men would have done a far better job. This seems a bit rude, until you understand what Herzog is getting at.

That becomes clearer in the epilogue. After taking our breath away with his duly postponed 3-D pans, Herzog shows us a nuclear power plant not far from the caves. The warm water from the reactors is piped into a series of huge greenhouses, within which a group of crocodiles bask in the tropical heat. Not surprisingly, Herzog intones in his famous Teutonic cadence, some of their offspring are albinos. [Update: The reptiles are actually alligators, and their whiteness has nothing to do with radiation. Read the full update here.]

The albino crocodiles are fascinating and disturbing to behold. Their eyes are as pink as strawberry ice cream, and their scaly skin is snow white. Herzog lets us observe them for a while before formulating his metaphor. The Earth is warming, he reminds us. This area, which used to be covered in 9,000 feet of ice, will someday be habitat for the offspring of these albino crocodiles. They will make their way to the caves. They will encounter the paintings. What will they make of what they see?

After the screening, Herzog admitted, “I love those crocodiles.” They are us, he added. That was his crazy thought, the one that made him worry about being dragged off to a padded room. But is it really so crazy? Modern man brought the crocodiles thousands of miles from their homes, and nuclear radiation turned them white. They have changed. They do not resemble their ancestors in the wild. Perhaps they will outlive them. Their ancestors are suited for a world that is passing; the albinos are primed to thrive in the world that is to come.

As I walked home from the screening, I got good and depressed pondering all of this. I felt severed from nature, disowned, unmanned. But, having watched Deliverance (finally!), I wonder if there isn't something wonderful about the whole thing as well. Sure, your average middle-class Westerner wouldn't be much use on a spear-hunting expedition, any more than a white crocodile would be in an ice age, but does it really matter? We are adapting to the future even as we shed the qualities that helped us make it this far. The process can be ugly—hell, it can be downright repulsive—but what's the alternative?

Because, honestly, can you imagine one of those paleolithic cave guys behind a 3-D camera, taking orders from Werner Herzog?